[pdftex] pdftex -ini

[Hans Hagen]

Hartmut Henkel wrote:

>On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>>>>>"jackos" == jackos  <jackos1 at poczta.onet.pl> writes:
>>>>>>>              
>>>>>>>
>>    > I'm not sure but ini mode do NOT perfomrs any assignments. As ar
>>    > as I know, even config is not read in this mode. pdftex.cfg is
>>    > read after loading the format, so to enforce \pdfoutput=1 in the
>>    > format one should probably say \everyjob{\pdfoutput=1}. Hey
>>    > people, am I right?
>>
>>AFAIK, pdftex.cfg had been read at the very beginning before the
>>format file was loaded.
>>
>>The latest (beta) releases of pdftex do not read pdftex.cfg any more.
>>All variables which had been defined in pdftex.cfg previously can be
>>set in the tex file now, either in the format file or later.  The
>>value of \pdfoutput is used when the first page is shipped out.
>>    
>>
>
>...and the \everyjob mechanism seems to be not needed in this case, as
>during the format building process the \pdfoutput flag is dumped into
>the format file, and therefore this value is used as default when using
>the pdftex production version. For \pdfmapfile{} the \everyjob is
>needed, as jackos has mentioned recently (i guess because the
>psfonts.map string is not dumped into the format).
>  
>
I can only talk from the perspective of ConTeXt, but normally one needs to do a little bit more than just setting \pdfoutput, like loading a specific backend driver, of initializing macros; this is why i always (force) pdfoutput to zero and explicitly initialize pdf output mode (which in turn will set pdfoutput). 

Hans 

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